Kimchi

Making kimchi, at least the way I do it, is super fun and easy. We eat it most days at our house. It’s great on egg and pasta dishes, and our casual party favorite mac and kimchis. We eat it in alone, in small quantities, and it is fantastic as a filling (mixed with some kind of protein such as beans) on top of a sourdough crepe. I also use it in ways that other people probably find disgusting, such as mixed with cottage cheese or on a veggie dog. But, I digress.

The great thing about kimchi is that it’s flexible and you can sub what you’ve got. I’ve used regular cabbage instead of napa, french breakfast radishes instead of daikon, and I’ve used leeks and/or red peppers and tons of other stuff I’ve pulled out of my garden or the off the stands at the farmer’s market. All-radish kimchi is traditional and so good! I’ve made it so spicy my spice-loving husband teared up and so unspicy my bland-loving friends and relatives raved. YOU CAN USE ANYTHING. Anything! Except tomatoes, cukes and squash which would mush. It’s going to taste delicious regardless of your vegetable choices so play around.

A note: generally when working with ferments, metal is not your friend. You won’t kill your kimchi like you would your kefir grains or your kombucha scoby, but as a habit, wooden or plastic utensils are better to use. During long fermentation, any metal in your container could corrode due to the lactic acid that is being produced.

Mixing up all that hot stuff. Gloves might have been a good idea.

Here’s my basic recipe to get you started, but remember, it’s up to you to make it taste how you like it to taste!

Thoroughly rinse cabbage, daikon, carrots, leek and bell pepper. Chop cabbage, discarding core. Put it in a big bowl full of room temperature water. This is to remove any excess dirt and debris. Rinse after 10-15 minutes of soaking.

Chop carrots, daikon, leek and bell pepper according to preference. Most traditional is larger pieces of cabbage and matchsticks of other veggies. Put chopped veggies in a large bowl. Add rinsed cabbage.

Mix salt into 8 cups of water (or more if needed) until dissolved. Pour over chopped veggies.

Submerge veggies under brine using whatever you have that fits. I use a plate. Cover container with a large cloth and secure with a rubber band. Let sit overnight or up to 24 hours.

After vegetables have brined, mix rice flour with 1 c cold water until dispersed. Put in a small pot over low heat. Stir constantly, 3-4 minutes, until mixture has thickened. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.*

While the rice mixture is cooling, start prepping the other paste ingredients. Coarsely chop ginger. Cut out any questionable parts, but do not peel.

Coarsely chop onions, scallions and garlic.

Place ginger, alliums and red pepper flakes into food processor and blend into a paste.** (If using fruit instead of rice paste, blend that up, too)

Mix together veggies and ginger/allium paste until veggies are well-coated.

Press them tightly into a jar (or other container that you could compress them into) and make sure they stay submerged. (We’ll discuss a couple methods for this).

Put them in a place out of direct sunlight, away from other ferments and that has a consistent room temperature (above 68, below 80).

Let them sit for 3-7 days, but for your first solo batch, feel free to start tasting at 3 days to see when it hits your flavor preference. When it’s done, stick it in the fridge. That will slow, but not stop, fermentation, so your kimchi will be more sour if you pull it out of the fridge in a month than it was when you put it in.

*If using fruit for your paste, skip this step

**If using fish sauce and/or shrimp paste, you would add it here. 1/8 c or to taste fish sauce. One T shrimp paste or a few tiny salted guys, added at the hand-mixing stage.

In the US, kimchi usually means one particular kimchi recipe that contains cabbages, radishes, ginger and spice. There are many other traditional kimchis and even more recipes made in individual homes.

**You can let this ferment as long as you’d like. Start tasting at 3 days, but if you like it a bit more acidic, keep it going. According to “The Art of Fermentation” by Sandor Katz a study conducted in Korea found the ideal fermenting time for kimchi is 3 days, due to changes in the type of bacteria that thrive during early and late fermentation. I usually try to leave mine a few days more but we are generally too hungry for kimchi to leave it much longer.

Rice flour is traditionally made to make the paste the serves as a kind of binder and sugar source in kimchi. The purpose of the flour is to both thicken the mass and to feed the microbes the sugars they need to thrive. I’ve made kimchi with nothing to serve that role, with various kinds of fruit, with wheat flour, etc. I’ve never tried potato starch, but you could give it a try with a small batch. It wouldn’t be my first choice, because I’m not sure how it’s processed, so depending on your fermentation time, it might be a bit rough on your digestive system, and could add that slimier potato starch texture.

You could definitely sub any kind of wheat flour, or just skip the rice flour step and combine your veggies with the pureed garlic/onion/ginger/hot pepper mixture.

So my kimchi came out way, way too spicy. I didn’t have the right kind of chili powders and improvised. In an attempt to make it less spicy, I added some sugar. I had to go away and it’s been in the fridge about a month. It’s still ridiculously spicy, I can feel my insides burning as I write this. But, now it’s gooey/goopy (instead of liquidy) in between the pieces of cabbage and carrots, is this normal? Should I throw it away? Also, when I opened it, it popped like there was a seal on the jar, is this just because it kept fermenting in the fridge? Really hope I didn’t just food poison myself by eating it. Thanks for the help

As for the issues, gochugaru (the traditional pepper powder) is not very spicy at all, so even substituting hot pepper that normally isn’t super hot to you could cause “overheating” if you use it in the same proportion as the gochugaru that is called for.

About greatly increasing the sugar, it will not counteract heat, and it will give you the wrong kind of fermentation. I don’t mean an unsafe kind, I mean that it will favor yeast over bacteria, causing extra fizz, the production of alcohol and mush much before you should have it. That explains your “goo” and the extra pop on the jar (although my containers often pop, just from vigorous fermentation that doesn’t completely stop in the fridge so that in itself is not of concern).

So for next time a few things that might help: omit or greatly reduce the sugar. Find a source for gochugaru, or reduce the amount of spice powder you use if using another kind. Also, remember that heat/spice is definitely subjective. I’ve eaten things that didn’t even register as spicy only to watch someone else have a coughing fit from the same level of spice. If you don’t love spice, try with a lower level with a new recipe. You can always add more later!

For this batch, you could try making some jigae (kimchi stew, google for recipes) or adding some fresh cabbage and other veggies to dissipate the heat a bit.

I know it has been a while so it wouldn’t help you but for the others, if your kimchi is too spicy for you, you can add some onion to make it less spicy and wait a day or two. I would put one or two. It gets little sweeter like when the onion is cooked, and makes more water so it makes less spicy. This is what my mom used to do when her kimchi got little spicy. I hope this helps.

I think it would be quite tricky to get the consistency of rice flour you need by blending rice. In my opinion you’d be better off skipping the rice flour altogether and using a bit of fruit instead, as detailed above.

As for the fish sauce and shrimp, included in the instructions, there is an option to include them. Although baechu kimchi is frequently made with those ingredients, it’s definitely not required. I do think fish sauce kimchi is more delicious than fish sauce-less kimchi, but there is a huge downside: it REEKS while fermenting. Like it smells a hundred times worse than anything else I ferment (and that’s a lot of things). I usually do a large batch once a year with fish sauce and the rest of the time, omit that step for my day-to-day kimchis! The choice is yours, though. There are hundreds of ways to make kimchi and fish sauce is certainly not required in all of them.

Great recipe! Just a note on your comment to Mary Beth. Rice flour is typically used to make gochujang but gochujang is not the mixture of chili powder etc. that is applied to veggies for kimchi. Gochujang is thick, sweet chili paste that is traditionally made by fermenting gochugaru, rice/barley malt, soybeans and salt, usually for months, in earthenware jars. The finished product is used for things like bibimbap, ddeokbokki, and some soups and banchan, but not for making kimchi.

I don’t know why it took me so long to find you. Your website is wonderful. So is this recipe. Our house of 2 has been eating a qt a week since I made it. Last night I made Kimchi fried rice with bacon and egg, holy smokes it was amazing. Thank you for all of your sharing! Kraut is in the works and I can’t wait to make more

Hi, Amanda! I love your blog. Just made your kimchi recipe (minus the bell peppers as they don’t agree with me) and am anxious to taste it. CURIOUS as to why the veggies get soaked in brine overnight and then drained before adding the paste the next day? Wouldn’t this lead to a loss of some of the veggie “goodness” in the discarded brine? Any particular reason that the salt wasn’t just added to the veggies to create brine from the veggies themselves? I used two cabbage leaves to cover the veggies and added some of the “drained” brine as the cabbage leaves weren’t submerged with just the veggie/paste mixture.

I’m just getting started with fermenting veggies; I’ve made small batches of kimchi (a different recipe), beets, your beets, your garlic cloves, your asparagus (which molded because I didn’t weight them down enough) and your sugar snap peas. Everything has been delicious!

Yet another beautiful day! My name is Leah.
I am making Kimchi. I have a lot of the soaking brine left over. Since I am going to make more next week, I am wondering if it is safe to store the brine in the refrigerator and use it again then. I am hoping you will be able to answer my question. Until then, and always, all the best to you and all you love,
Leah

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